Release notes for 4.8pre2

We are pleased to announce the second preview release of Xfce 4.8. This
release marks the beginning of the string freeze. From today on until
the final release, strings may no longer be changed in the master branch
of Xfce core components. This will help translators to prepare their
translations for the final release scheduled on January 16th, 2011.

For this release we focused on fixing bugs in all Xfce components. We
managed to close a great number of them thanks to all the persons who
reported them and tested proposed fixes quickly.

A few minor panel features were added despite feature freeze. We also
managed to work on two long time requests: proper support for editing
the application menu with menu editors (Alacarte being the one that we
tested) and integration with the Compiz viewport. Of course, this
release also features a lot of new and improved translations thanks to
the amazing work of our translation teams.

We hope you will enjoy this release. Please give us feedback by sharing
your thoughts, blogging, tweeting, denting or by filing bug reports.
With your help, 4.8 will be the best release ever (at least until
4.10)!

Kind regards and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this
release,

Release notes for 4.8pre1

The Xfce development team is proud to announce the first preview release
for Xfce 4.8. Together with this preview release, the Xfce project
announces the feature freeze for the final 4.8 release which is set to
be pushed out to the world on January 16th, 2011.

This release incorporates major changes to the core of the Xfce desktop
environment and hopefully succeeds in fulfilling a number of long time
requests. Among the most notable updates is that we have ported the
entire Xfce core (Thunar, xfdesktop and thunar-volman in particular)
from ThunarVFS to GIO, bringing remote filesystems to the Xfce desktop.
The panel has been rewritten from scratch and provides better launcher
management and improved multi-head support. The list of new panel
features is too long to mention in its entirety here. Thanks to the new
menu library garcon (formerly known as libxfce4menu, but rewritten once
again) we now support menu editing via a third-party menu editor such as
Alacarte (we do not ship our own yet). Our core libraries have been
streamlined a bit, a good examplle being the newly introduced libxfce4ui
library which is meant to replace libxfcegui4.

Perhaps the most important achievement we will accomplish with Xfce 4.8
is that, despite suffering from the small size of the development team
from time to time, the core of the desktop environment has been aligned
with today’s desktop technologies such as GIO, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit,
udev and many more. A lot of old cruft like has been stripped from the
core as well, as has happened with HAL and ThunarVFS (which is still
around for compatibility reasons).

Thanks to the awesome Transifex translation platform, our language teams
have been able to update their translations at an incredible pace.
Please include them when praising this release!

A complete list of all changes since the latest stable release is
available on

Below you will find download information for Xfce4.8pre1. Please give
our mirrors a few hours to synchronize. We hope you will enjoy this
release, feel encouraged to blog and tweet about it! Feedback is welcome
in all forms. Bugs can be reported in our bug tracker as usual.
We need your help to make Xfce 4.8 our best release ever!

Kind regards and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this
release,

Now that all Xfce dependencies have been removed from libxfce4menu, I'm planning to rename it to something more generic. Travis Watkins from Alacarte has expressed interest in helping with writing the XfceMenuEditor (err GDesktopMenuEditor) part. He is also working on Vala bindings for the library.

With a more complete API and polished code perhaps we can even move gdesktopmenu over to freedesktop.org ... who knows.